Building Inclusive Communities in Rural Canada

Emerging from a workshop at the University of Alberta in 2018, Building Inclusive Communities in Rural Canada is an eclectic volume of social science research that seeks to understand and ultimately combat issues of racism and intolerance in rural communities, with a particular focus on western Canada. Editors Clark Banack and Dionne Pohler have succeeded in their aim “to make a rural-specific contribution to the topic of anti-racism,” highlighting the importance of practical approaches to everyday relations in rural contexts (xx). They do so from a uniquely Canadian perspective, noting that much of the research on rural diversity and (in)tolerance in the United States cannot simply be transposed to Canada. Contributions focus on anti-Indigenous racism and/or attitudes toward recent immigrants, including refugee resettlement and the integration of visible and religious minorities. Long-established racialized communities, including historic Black and Asian communities in various parts of Canada, are not addressed directly by this volume.Banack and Pohler place their focus on the everyday interactions of individuals, while not dismissing the broader structural issues that shape rural communities. To this end, they contend, scholars must approach anti-racist work in rural places with “terms, concepts, and language that are already woven into their communities and sense of identity” (xxi). Foremost is the idea of “neighborliness,” “a concept that is already deeply engrained in rural life” and that “could serve as a practical, rural-based way to broach issues of cultural, racial, and religious inclusivity” (xxi). Throughout the volume, contributors refer to a goal of “deep equality” in rural communities, moving beyond mere tolerance to a “relational conception of inclusion” and a “desire to be in community together” (xxii). Despite the range of research approaches, there is admirable mutual referencing among the chapters, with very little content that feels repetitive across the volume.The book is divided into four sections. The first section includes efforts to gauge demographic diversity in rural Canada, with an extensive exploration of rural population models, followed by a discussion of research on the visibility of diversity in rural Quebec schools. The second section offers research findings from ethnographic and qualitative studies about attitudes toward inclusion and diversity among evangelical Christians in Alberta, morning coffee groups in Alberta, and refugee sponsorship groups across Canada. The latter chapter, by Stacey Haugen, reveals the ambivalent and often conflicting attitudes of some sponsorship group members, who harbored expectations that refugees should look and act more impoverished and grateful than they did, even as they sought to mitigate racism elsewhere in their communities. These chapters underscore what research has consistently shown: Rural communities are more than their stereotypes, neither bastions of xenophobia nor uniquely welcoming, but instead a complex mixture of everything in between.The third section highlights the key role of education in efforts to challenge prejudice and build inclusive communities. Chapters consider both formal instruction and informal community learning, such as board game sessions and contextual Bible study classes, as methods for transforming community attitudes. Michael Corbett, Jennifer Tinkham, and Claudine Bonner reflect on their experiences as professors of preservice teachers, mainly young, white people drawn from rural communities in Atlantic Canada. The authors note that their students frequently invoke what Yang and Tuck call “moves to innocence,” denying the relevance of issues of racialization to their everyday lives, and retreating to silence when such topics are raised (153). Following from their observations, the authors recommend “stronger grounding in the social sciences and humanities . . . for more complex understandings of the modern world” (169). Hear, hear!The fourth section begins with a discussion of cooperatives in western Canada as opportunities for community-building and integration. The final two chapters of the book, which theorize “neighborliness,” are the most potent. In contrast to the depersonalized “tolerance talk” of politicians, Phil Henderson describes neighborliness as a “common-sense practice of anti-hate” and “a grounded anti-racist framework” that is already widespread in rural communities (253). Roger Epp concurs, also drawing from Plains Cree political theory to suggest that the language of neighborliness “localizes, deescalates, and reconstitutes” relationships that may be limited and hardened by historical power relations (284). Epp provides examples of reciprocal neighborliness in action in communities in the West where Indigenous and settler populations live side by side, placing these examples in contrast to the more conventional picture of tension and racist violence in the region. These treaty relationships tend to be built without government involvement, as “practical, local, and contextual” (283) responses to specific needs and circumstances.Taken together, these articles are a firm reminder that rural places are deeply divided and internally contested. These communities are home to people who espouse reactionary political views, living alongside their neighbors and family members who find these attitudes shameful. Many of the latter are already actively engaged in anti-racist organizing and doing the difficult personal work of unlearning their own prejudices. Building Inclusive Communities in Rural Canada does not provide solutions to the problem of intolerance in rural communities, but this was never the editors’ aim. Instead, the volume is an invitation to keep the conversation going in terms that will ideally be accessible and useful to residents of rural communities as they imagine and build “a new way of living together” (271).